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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is Paulsen's sustained free-indirect meditation on the word 'Divorce' from inside Brian's thirteen-year-old mind. The prose performs what it describes: the em-dashes break the sentence apart the way the divorce breaks Brian's home apart; the phrase 'all the solid things' is repeated because Brian's mind keeps returning to it; the closing 'Divorce. A breaking word, an ugly breaking word.' collapses into the drumbeat rhythm the chapter will use for the rest of the page. It is a master-class in how syntax can enact feeling.
It was an ugly word, he thought. A tearing, ugly word that meant fights and yelling, lawyers—God, he thought, how he hated lawyers who sat with their comfortable smiles and tried to explain to him in ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In four to six sentences, retell the arc of Chapter 1 — Brian Robeson's flight to his father in the Canadian oil fields, the content of his thinking during the flight, the pilot's sudden heart attack, and the chapter's closing image. Focus on the relation between Brian's inner experience and the outer emergency.
Discussion Questions
- Paulsen structures the chapter so that the words 'Divorce,' 'The Secret,' 'Split,' and 'Fights' appear as isolated one-word paragraphs between passages of longer prose. What does this typographic strategy suggest about the author's theory of how the mind holds traumatic material, and how does it prepare the reader for the rhythmic collapse at the chapter's end?
- Brian carries two inheritances from his mother in this chapter: a Secret he refuses to disclose and a hatchet she gave him as a parting gift. Paulsen refuses to tell the reader what the Secret is. Why might the author have chosen to make Brian's moral burden unspeakable while making his material tool nameable, and what does this asymmetry do to our sense of Brian's character?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Ripping or pulling apart forcefully; here, an adjective applied figuratively to a word whose effect is to rend what was whole.
Item 2
Breaking suddenly into many pieces; used figuratively of something that destroys coherence or stability.
Item 3
At ease; here, applied bitterly to the lawyers' smiles to suggest an ease the thirteen-year-old protagonist finds morally obscene.
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Critical Thinking
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